The picture of Lawrence as a bloodthirsty sadist whose inherent cruelty was finally brought into play by the torture he suffered at Dara’a was much encouraged by David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia,in which Lawrence is seen dripping with blood after the battle at Tafas. How much truth is there in such an image? A close reading of Seven Pillarsreveals an obsession with cruelty which some have taken to indicate that Lawrence had a sadistic nature. On his very first railway attack near Aba an Na’am, for example, he described how his men captured a shepherd boy whom they kept tied up and threatened to kill, while butchering his goats. There are the beatings which the imaginary ‘Farraj and Da’ud’ constantly seem to have endured for their pranks, not to mention being made to sit on scorching rocks, and clapped in irons for a week; the Circassian youth, not even a combatant, who was dragged around for an hour by camel, stripped naked and whose feet were then deliberately slit open across the soles – a nauseating and pointless assault; and the even more bizarre incident Lawrence recorded, when his bodyguard picked acacia thorns from a bush and drove them into a man’s body for some unexplained crime. The more sadistic of these punishments are nowhere recorded as customary among the Arabs by the great Arabian travellers, and seem alien to Bedu culture. Wilfred Thesiger, indeed, wrote that the Bedu were so mindful of the dignity of others that they would prefer to kill a man rather than humiliate him. Some of the accounts may be imaginary – an expression of masochistic rather than sadistic fantasy: Lawrence’s
constant concern with his own pain and suffering makes it clear that it was not with the perpetrators but with the victims of these imaginary punishments that he identified. While a masochistic tendency is clearly observable throughout his life, a sadistic stratum is not. Lawrence was by nature gentle, highly sensitive and compassionate: ‘… they say his mouth suggests cruelty,’ wrote his friend Vyvyan Richards; ‘… is there any trace of that in his nature? I have found none in all the thirty years I have known him… his campaign shows only strong justice where patience and mercy would have been a greater evil.’ 21Alec Kirkbride, who was with Lawrence at the very end of the Syrian campaign, wrote: ‘it is complete nonsense to describe him as having been either sadistic or fond of killing … He once told me that his ideal of waging war was based on the professional condottieri of medieval Italy. That is to say, to gain one’s objectives with a minimum of casualties on both sides.’ 22
Lawrence makes two related claims in Seven Pillarsregarding Tafas: first, that he gave the Arabs the order to take no prisoners, and secondly, that the Arab regulars machine-gunned a host of prisoners with his approval. He does not state specifically that he himself ordered the prisoners shot: this claim only appears after the war in conversation with his brother Arnie. Unlike most events in Lawrence’s career, though, there were other witnesses at the battle of Tafas. Fred Peake, who arrived there soon after Lawrence, and who saw the atrocities for himself, wrote to Arnie Lawrence years later that his brother had actually tried to halt the killing of wounded Turks. The Arabs had gone berserk, Peake said, and when he turned up with his Camel Corps detachment, Lawrence had asked him to restore order. Peake had dismounted 100 troopers and marched them into Tafas with fixed bayonets. The Arabs had given way, stopped killing the wounded, and had ridden after the retreating column, finishing off a few strays but withdrawing quickly when they saw that the Turks meant to fight. It is hardly surprising that Lawrence should have failed to mention this, for among the berserk Arabs were members of his own bodyguard over whom he claimed to have an almost hypnotic control. 23As for the ‘no prisoners’ command, Peake recalled that Lawrence had ordered him personally to ensure the safety of Turkish prisoners – proof, he said, that there was never any such thing. Moreover there is a discrepancy in Lawrence’s two accounts of the massacre, for while in his official dispatch he wrote ‘we’ ordered ‘no prisoners’, in Seven Pillarsthe ‘we’ has become T. There were several senior figures present by the time Lawrence arrived at Tafas: Sharif Nasir, who was in command of the irregulars, and Nuri as-Sa’id, in charge of the trained troops. Auda Abu Tayyi was also present, and was said by Lawrence himself to have taken command of the last phase of the attack. Is it likely, therefore, that Lawrence, who claimed to work through the Arabs’ own leaders rather than taking the foreground himself, should have been in a position to order the entire Arab force to take no prisoners? Both Peake and biographer john Mack agreed that the ‘we’ was a ‘commander’s we’ – that is, not a personal order, but an assumption of responsibility. Young, who was not present at Tafas, heard from an Arab officer named ‘Ali Jaudet that he and Lawrence had desperately tried to prevent the killing of prisoners after the battle, but to no avail. ‘I am certain,’ Peake wrote, ‘that Lawrence did all he could to stop the massacre but he would have been quite unable to do anything as any human mob that has lost its head is beyond control.’ 24According to Nuri as-Sa’id, however, many Turkish prisoners who fell into Arab hands had actually survived. 25Why should Lawrence claim falsely to have committed an act which he knew was against military convention, not to mention morally reprehensible, especially when he was known as a man of great compassion – who had, indeed, only weeks before, spared an unarmed Turkish soldier he had come across on the railway, and who had written to Edward Leeds that the ‘killing and killing’ of Turks sickened him? There are resonances here of the tale of Hamad the Moor’s execution – the alleged incident which forms the overture to his arrival in the desert battle-zone. On the one hand such apparent acts depict Lawrence as a strong and ruthless man capable of righteous anger, on the other they show an apparent burden of guilt which he delighted in displaying to the world. Arnie Lawrence himself suggested to John Mack that he had doubts about the veracity of his brother’s claim, and Alec Kirkbride believed that Lawrence had a horror of bloodshed: ‘… it is because of this,’ he wrote, ‘that he tends to pile on the agony in the passages of Seven Pillars,dealing with death and wounds … however, I suspected him of liking to suffer himself.’ 26Indeed, there is a sense in which Lawrence, the masochist, liked to absorb the sin and suffering of the world: the duplicity of the British he bore on his shoulders, together with the inconstancy, cruelty and barbarousness of the Arabs. There is, as we have already seen, a Christ-like leitmotif in Lawrence’s story – especially in his betrayal, torture and humiliation at Dara’a and his ‘resurrection’ afterwards. Lawrence was perfectly aware of this messianic strand: just as Christ died for the sins of the world, Lawrence’s penchant for sacrifice may have obliged him to assume responsibility for savage acts in which he personally had played no part. 27